1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a feeding apparatus for information storage disks. More particularly, the present invention relates to a feeding apparatus using rotational components to feed information storage disks such as compact disks.
2. Description of Related Art
Information storage disks, such as compact disks (CDs) including Compact Disc-Recordable (CD-R), Compact Disc ReWritable (CD-RW), DVD recordable (DVD-R) etc. store digital information in a variety of formats. Generally, for mass replication or the manufacturing of information storage disks such as compact disks, stamps are typically used to transfer data from the master to unrecorded or blank compact disks. However, using the stamp method is only suitable to replicate an amount of a thousand or more disks. Otherwise, the average cost to replicate or manufacture each single compact disk will be expensive and not economic.
For home users or small business users, burners are another solution to replicate disks when only several or tens of disk copies are needed. In addition, automatic burners are convenient to the home users or small business users and save much time when duplicating the compact disks.
A typical automatic compact disk duplication system comprises a robotic arm to deliver blank disks among several working positions. The robotic arm catches one blank disk and conveys the blank disk to a tray of a burner to write data in. After the burner writes the blank compact disk, the robotic arm removes the recorded disk from the tray and conveys the recorded disk to a disk container. Then, the robotic arm catches another blank disk and places the blank disk to the burner tray to write. The operation of the robotic arm is repeated until an amount of the disk copies is achieved.
However, the mechanical structure of the robotic arm is sophisticated, which causes high manufacturing costs. Besides, the entire robotic arm is bulky and occupies a large storage space that is inconvenient to be packaged and/or transported. The automatic compact disk duplication system is expensive.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an improved disk-feeding apparatus to mitigate or obviate the aforementioned problems.